A small crowd composed of teenagers that are waiting in line at the entrance of the Musique Plus building (the Quebec equivalent to MTV) to see a free concert of the Quebec band Simple Plan, despite the snowstorm on Montreal!
Hurry up, run fast to your favorite chemistry store if you don’t want to miss this amazing offer of a CA$10 (¥70) gift certificate at an electronics store for the purchase of a 500 ml bottle of fetal bovine serum! This offer ends on March 21, 2008! I took the photo in the University, the ad was hanging on the glass of a skyway linking two buildings together.
I have a test friday! It will be my first test in 10 months. So I will be back on friday… or saturday! See you soon!
Valentine’s Day, the annual love feast… I hope you all had a happy Valentine’s Day. How do you celebrate this holiday in your respective countries?
Chaque fois que j’entre dans un entrepôt, je suis toujours impressionné par la taille de l’endroit. On se sent très petit dans un espace aussi immense. Ce que vous voyez sur la photo n’est qu’une des quatre sections auxquelles j’ai accès. Il y a trois autres sections où je n’ai pas le droit d’entrer, et peut-être d’autres sections que je ne connais pas… J’ai estimé les dimensions de cette section à 250 m X 150 m.
Cada vez que entro en un depósito, estoy impresionado por el tamaño del lugar. Uno se siente muy pequeño en un lugar tan inmenso. Lo que se ve en la foto sólo es una de las cuatro secciones dónde tengo derecho de entrar. Hay tres otras secciones en cuáles no puedo entrar y probablemente otras secciones también que no conozco… He estimado que las dimensiones de este lugar son de 250 m X 150 m.
Everytime I enter a warehouse, I always feel impressed by its size. One feels very small when they enter such a huge place. What you can see on the picture is only one section out of the four that I have access to in the warehouse. There are three other sections of the warehouse that is off-limits to me and probably other sections that I don’t even know of… I have estimated the dimensions of this section to be 250 m X 150 m.
It seems like in every country, some local brandnames have grown up to a point where they hold the monopoly over a given economic sector. Usually they are not exported to foreign countries, except if they come from economic superpowers such as the United States, Japan, South Korea, Europe and so forth. Brandnames such as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Mitsubishi, Daewoo, etc. will easily make their way through all over the world. Yet in smaller countries, the situation is different. In Buenos Aires, for instance, there is a chain of pizzerias that seems to hold the monopoly over all the pizzeria market of the city. Its brandname is Ugi’s. They are simply everywhere in the capital city of Argentina. But once you get past the city limit, you never get to see one Ugi’s again…
In a Ugi’s, the menu is pretty simple. Actually the only choice you have is whether you want a quarter of a pizza, the half or the whole. The pizza in itself is always the same, you have no choice over the ingredients that are put in it. Well, actually, you can choose whether or not to put salt or oregano, once the pizza is served to you, but I would not consider these seasonings as ingredients. So you decide the size of the portion you want and the drink. Note that the price of a soft drink (gaseosa) is the same as that of a beer (cerveza). 3 argentinian pesos = 0,90 dollars.
So, you now know there is only one choice of pizza in a Ugi’s. But what kind of pizza is it? Is it pepperoni? All-dressed? Mexican?… Actually none of these. The only kind of pizza that is prepared in a Ugi’s is mozzarrella pizza. But the interesting thing about it, is the way the cook actually puts the cheese on the pizza. They do not use grated cheese as I believed was the only way of making a pizza. They put two or three whole pieces of cheese on the pizza. The following sequence describes how pizzas are made in a Ugi’s. On this first photo, the tomato sauce is being spread after having been poured on the crust. Let’s see what happens next…
As described in the last paragraph, whole pieces of cheese are put on the pizza, instead of grated cheese as one would expect.
The pizza is put in the oven.
When the pizza is ready, the crust is crounchy and the cheese has melted. Then, the pizza is removed from the oven. A cook then spreads the melted cheese all over the surface of the crust with a ladle. (This step is avoided when using grated cheese).
Voilà! The pizza is ready to be served! It is cut in eighths to facilitate its handling and consumption.
Just to make sure their customers don’t fall in the hell of drugs, a slogan says it all on the cover of their packages: “say no to drugs, but yes to pizza!”. Thank you Ugi’s, you saved my life!
When tourists arrive in Montevideo for the first time, they notice that there are horses everywhere. At first they think it might be a tourist attraction, supported and financed by the government. But, by asking locals, one realizes that it is far from being the reality. Actually, it results from a social problem. People who live on the outskirts of the city, who have no job and therefore who are very poor, come to the city by horse with empty bags hanging on a cart. They go back home at the end of the day with the bags full of garbage that they will try to sell afterwards. They mostly collect cardboard, plastic and anything made of metal. They are the “unofficial garbage collectors”.
They do what many people would not be willing to do: they scavenge for things in garbage bins. They sometimes completely enter garbage bins, and put their hands in the trash in order to find something interesting for recycling companies.
At the end of the day, these people have collected so much stuff that they often don’t even have enough room left in their cart to put it.
Some of them have found a solution to that problem: they use a truck instead of a horse. A truck usually has more power than a horse, so it is possible to use a larger cart than with a horse. However, the problem in using a truck is that it is very expensive, especially for gas. And that is why most scavengers use horse-drawn carts, they are the poorest people in Uruguay. Therefore, by using horses, they only have to pay for some weeds to feed the animal, and that’s it. And sometimes they don’t even need to pay for it, as they find weeds in garbage bins.
They often work in teams of two: one scavenges for interesting stuff through the garbage bins and the other places the stuff on the cart. There is also a lot of competition. It is not uncommon to see a scavenger arriving to a garbage bin and seeing that there is already someone else in it.
In Santiago de Chile, what scavengers are most interested in, is cardboard. They collect pounds of cardboard that they sell afterwards to recycling companies. Notice that they do not use horses.
In Buenos Aires, scavengers also seem to be very interested in collecting cardboard. Like in Santiago, they use some sort of tricycle to move their things. Instead of a tricycle, some others use two-handled carts. This kind of cart seems very heavy. It must be a very exhausting job, especially under Argentina’s summer sun or under the heavy rain.
Unfortunately this is a reality that we see everywhere on the globe, from the poorest countries up to the wealthiest: people who scavenge in garbage bins hoping to find something of value in order to sell it to a third party. If they had had the chance of choosing another kind of job I don’t doubt they would have done it. Most of the people who are in this type of situation do not choose to live that kind of life, so let us not judge them and let us hope our societies become more just in the near future.
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